Explore fiction
A Killing
Katherine Faw Morris
COKE SMELLS COLD AND CHEMICAL LIKE THE INSIDE OF A REFRIGERATOR. It’s what back then smells like, now when she thinks of it.
Bakamonotako
Brenda Shaughnessy
‘Bakamonotako felt she didn’t need all eight of her appendages. Four would do.’
Spelling Problem
Lydia Davis
‘A woman from Barnard College calls me and asks if I would please spell ‘hemorrhaging’ for her.’

Quarter Past Midnight
Marie-Helene Bertino
‘Flute-like, gauze-filled, late-afternoon sunshine. Rainbow bracelets on the carpet. They use their tongues to wet their lips. Girls.’
Why I Can No Longer Look at a Picnic Blanket Without Laughing
Yukiko Motoya
‘But the customer had already been in the changing room for three hours.’
Eyes That Have Seen the Sea
Tomás González
‘He had just finished unpacking his rucksack, new only ten days ago and now a sodden, salty, decomposing rag, when they called him.’
The Family Friend
Julia Franck
‘We’ve got a lot of family friends but Thorsten has been coming round far too often recently and I wonder whether I shouldn’t tell her that sometime.’
Exotics
Callan Wink
‘He’d come to tell her that he was leaving. It seemed rather impossible now – the telling, not the leaving.’

Grandma and Me
Thomas McGuane
‘Barring weather or a World Series game, on Sundays I’d pick up a nice little box lunch from Mustang Catering and take Grandma some place that smelled good.’
Eight Trains
Alberto Olmos
‘To go is always to go somewhere; returning, you return to nowhere. That’s the way it is.’
Japan Lights
Sarah Moss
‘She kneels and bows her head almost to the floor, as if pretending he’s one of her idols.’
O-bakanaru
Eric Ozawa
‘When your wife walks away from you, she does not disappear. When you turn your back, she does not vanish. She will be there when you open your eyes.’
Relic Light
Eric Gamalinda
‘Unconfirmed stories that have been retold so often they acquire the polish of truth, like the rosary beads people here carry in their pockets and pull out whenever the need for reassurance arises.’
Domain
Louise Erdrich
‘Seven corporations control the afterlife now, and many people spend their lives amassing the money to upload into the best.’
Bucket of Eels
Mitsuyo Kakuta
‘I was gazing into my empty bowl and realizing how little time it takes to eat when you’re not carrying on a conversation.’
Ghosts
Brian Hart
‘The road pleasantly gained and lost elevation, flood gauges in dry washes and scraggy hilltops, corners that begged for two wheels not four.’
Blasphemy
Fatima Bhutto
The tourists are gone. They’ve fled to Islamabad, along with the landlords and the hoteliers and the battalions of police that used to defend them, and certainty has left with them.

My Mother’s Death Party
Ben Janse
‘When I was eleven I fell out of a tree. This is why I can see into the future.’
Books and Roses
Helen Oyeyemi
‘A golden chain was fastened around her neck, and on that chain was a key.’
Zoraida
Tanya Rey
‘Desire was a slapping, bone-chilling wind the likes of which did not exist this close to the equator.’
Sand
John Biguenet
‘The catastrophe had not happened to all of us, we began to understand, but to each of us.’
Spider Lilies
Hiroko Oyamada
‘The breeze smelled of many things: autumn and earth, the green of the countryside, face powder and old age.’
